Placr News

Dear DSB Chair,

This is an alternative briefing to the one that you will be offered by civil servants in Dept. of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) after your appointment. Doubtless you have already been visited by @SirBonar who will have impressed upon you the dangers of talking to the press, industry, academia or the open community, but I have a mole who will have slipped this paper into your pile. Which is why you are reading this now…

Let’s start with your aims, which are to:

“seek to maximise the value of data from the Public Data Group (PDG) of Trading Funds for long-term economic and social benefit” para 11 Autumn Statement 2011

Obviously, as Public Data Group (PDG) will be made up of Trading Funds that report to Shareholder Executive and Ministers at BIS, you will have no influence over PDG, who will resent your meddling in their affairs. Should you spurn their attempts to “clientise” you (plan A), they will move on “death by consultancy” (plan B) in which spurious evidence will be presented to you masquerading as independent thinking. You will probably expect to dodge these hazards by commissioning your own research with some of your budget. This will enable you to define “long-term economic and social benefit” not as “a strong civil service with profitable trading agencies” but as “reduction of costs across the economy, creation of 21st century digital infrastructure and freedom of the digital commons”.

Next, you will have to be concerned about some of the members of your committee who will be there to keep you “on message”. After all 70% of the committee will be from the public sector, who have absolutely no need to release any data unless Ministers insist. Remarkably, the committee will be allowed to have ‘data users from outside the public sector’; however, they will also have been carefully chosen. Like all committees that are constituted to ‘do good’, you will be given just enough members (15-20?) to ensure that you cannot make bold decisions. So you will probably set up selected sub-committees to take decisions and ensure that their minutes are ‘taken as read’. This should enable you to lasso some core reference data without the sleepier members of the committee noticing. You will have to be careful with this ploy: the PDG will carefully ‘descope’ any data you want to release. The Ordnance Survey were forced to release 1:10,000 maps as open data in 2010, but they cunningly removed the field boundaries and contours from the final released data.

Of course you will have some money to spend on freeing data. However, the trouble with using DSB money to “buy” data from the PDG is that taxpayers have already paid for it: after all there is a government ‘first purchaser’ for all data created by government. So if you spend some of the PDG profits on data, you will be spending taxpayers money for the data a second time… and sooner or later the Taxpayers Alliance will notice this. There is nothing so dangerous for a quango as tempting tabloid headlines about “stealth taxes”. Of course the PDG will be delighted if DSB has a “publicity malfunction” along these lines, as this will strengthen their hand with Ministers. So the trick here is to use your money in really cunning way e.g. to buy out system integrators who have exclusive contracts to handle public data e.g. Texunatech who distribute Edubase with restrictions.

You will also have rivals for Ministers’ affections, and you will have to watch your back carefully. There is the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information which almost the same terms of reference as you do, but belongs to the Ministry of Justice. Oh dear, then there is UK Location which is “a UK pan-government initiative to improve the sharing and re-use of public sector location information”, which is in DEFRA. Hmm, then there is the Office of Public Sector Information, which is, er, also part of the Ministry of Justice. And then there’s the Office of Fair Trading Markets Group who published a report on “Commercial use of public information” in 2008. And Consumer Focus have just launched their Online Public Services Manifesto that calls for government to “Publish public information in ways that make it easy to be re-used”. Not to forget the Information Commissioners Office whose “mission is to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals”. Carving out a niche is going to take some creativity… so rigorous branding, web identity and mission statements will demand high quality production values and will need to be widely circulated, preferably on paper as decision makers prefer it that way.

Finally, beware those pesky MP’s, currently debating the Protection of Freedoms Bill in Parliament. If they enact this bill unaltered, then para 102 extends the Freedom of Information Act to allow requests to be answered as data and not just PDFs of documents. Cleverly, this clause in the bill (now in its report stage) also allows public bodies to make a charge for any data that they are forced to release (Section 3, modifiying Section 11 of the FOI Act of 2000). This means that every darn government department will be releasing data and charging for it without going through the Public Data Group in BIS. Unless PDG get the data, you can’t tax the PDG dividends for the DSB budget, which would be a disaster.

So, what then can you plan as your legacy? Since the City, corporations and the Open Community will not see you as representing their interests… perhaps a high objective would be the unification of government data regulation into a single quango called OFDATA. Play the long game… Apple and Google will likely force change on the PDG agencies with extreme prejudice, and so the DSB budget may not last all that long. But creation of an integrated regulator for data would be a real legacy and one that would always carry your name.

Best wishes

Jonathan

Placr were delighted to host a visit from Navitime last week. Navitime have been visiting the UK on a fact-finding mission, looking at pedestrian navigation and travel information solutions. Navitime offer the most advanced solutions in the world in this sector with their Japanese service hosting 4 million unique users.

The Navitime service is worth studying closely by those interested in the future trajectory of location-based services. The Navitime service works, and works well… I have used it in Tokyo myself. But it is based on wall to wall 3G services (GSM has been decommissioned in Japan), most users have flat data tariffs that do not punish data usage, and the majority of phones now have GPS supported by network-based location determination systems. Navitime have also invested in building imagery, sidewalk networks and real-time transport data feeds, much of which we do not have here.

Placr strongly believe in the future of LBS and have a number of propositions under development in this area. But LBS will likely only succeed when the location proposition is built on top of a rock solid user experience. Navitime have succeeded because they make excellent applications, but also because the mobile operators have built the infrastructure and ecosystem that supports the applications. European networks are improving (3G-only networks like ’3′ are building significant coverage), but expectations on LBS revenues in Europe should be scaled to the progress of the infrastructure and devices. Innovative design can only achieve so much without infrastructure: one poor experience of location determination which produces wrong or out of date information tells the user that a service is not ready for prime time.

Placr have developed significant technology in mobile positioning and travel information that we hope will help to join the dots between LBS infrastructure, data streams and applications. More on this soon.

Jonathan

Looking forward to the Where 2.0 Birds of a feather session on Open Transport at Where 2.0 2010 (Blossom Hill rooms on the 3rd floor at 7.30pm).

Open transport data is a hot topic at the moment because governments and cities around the world are seeing the benefits of letting developers get access to real time transport data streams to produce mashups and mobile applications for travellers. So for example these cities already have policies in place:

San Francisco
Boston
London

The idea of the session tonight is to discuss how to encourage/ justify/ drive these movements and to find out what works. For example, we can already see apps like:

Baytripper
Traintimes

There are also some platforms being developed such as:

Opentripplanner
Georest

But it is not all plain sailing yet… there are issues around

Policies- what is the right way for administrations to release data?

Providers- who has actually got the data and through what channels do they release it?

Protocols- what types of protocols should be used to serve up data, and how should API’s be constructed?

Platforms- should the data be released as native/ hybrid or web apps

Come and join us for the discussion and bring your experiences!

Jonathan Raper

Dear CLG,

Thank you for an opportunity to comment on the proposed changes to the funding of the OS and the pricing of its products. This response is submitted by Placr Ltd. a micro company with 4 employees based in London that is in the business of B2C and B2B value added information services in the mobile and geospatial domain. Our business will be significantly affected whatever the outcome of this consultation is: we are responding to add our voice to others who want to see a change in the way the OS is structured and funded.

Prof Jonathan Raper
CEO

Question 1:  What are your views or comments on the policy drivers for this consultation?

Placr believe that geospatial data is the infrastructure of the 21st century and needs funding in the same way as other infrastructure i.e. from the public purse on the basis of positive cost-benefit analysis. Studies over 10 years e.g. 1999 Oxera study, 2008 Cambridge study have shown that the cost-benefit to the nation of funding OS is positive on a wide range of methodologies. Forcing OS to recover its costs has created an OS monopoly on value creation, distorted markets through tiered (Ramsay) pricing and led to wasteful internal government trading.

Placr would advocate the government to fund the OS from general taxation to collect and release data at marginal distribution cost, and then to collect the tax revenue from commercial activity around its exploitation. We believe that the economic analysis in §1.24 to §1.28 does not take account of the new tax revenues from enterprises that could exploit OS data if it were released at marginal distribution cost. We are in a position to take advantage of such an opportunity and would be able to grow strongly on the release of new value added services.

It seems to Placr that the consequent policy questions would then be:

a) Can OS be innovative and efficient as a central government agency if it gets no signals directly from the market through revenues?

Placr believe that the answer to this question is yes, as its mission would be to produce data with less ‘refinement’ than at present, therefore requiring less attention to the market for value addition. The release of ‘unrefined’ data such as large scale land cover, transport networks, boundaries, small scale maps, addresses and imagery at marginal cost would allow a utility maximising approach for society, as individuals, public bodies, social enterprises and corporations all innovate using the data. Much duplication could be removed from the OS catalogue eg 10K and 25K maps, Strategi and Meridian, Landform Profile and Panorama, Address Point and Code Point etc. as these can be derived from each other or from the large scale data in the database.

b) How can the OS mission be directed if not by the market?

Placr believes that data production should be tied to social and economic planning on long timescales linked to spatial data infrastructures such as the INSPIRE Directive and the Location Strategy (§4.38). The OS would be tasked with meeting update and completeness targets for the core unrefined datasets, and central government funding should be given in pursuit of these objectives. This would also require exposure of the real costs of the constituent businesses within OS as clearly most of the costs are in the large data collection from which the other datasets are derived.

Question 2:  What are your views on how the market for geographic information has evolved recently and is likely to develop over the next 5-10 years?

Placr believe that OS data is infrastructure and so its release should not be dependent on market trends in current GI products. We believe that tracking the market has distracted the OS from its core mission to secure and develop the infrastructure for the long term. The short term needs of the market drag the OS in different directions leading to frequent re-specifications of its mission. It is more important for infrastructure that the OS can ensure consistency in referencing systems e.g. across addressing systems, achieve convergence in parcel identification e.g. NLPG and Mastermap TOIDs, and that it meet the rising demands for GPS-consistent maps. Placr believes these are the more important long term tasks for the OS and that the market is not important to these.

Question 3:  What are your views on the appropriate pricing model for Ordnance Survey products and services?

Placr believes that the OS does not need a pricing model as it should be releasing a simpler and more unrefined set of datasets at marginal distribution cost. Attempting to manage price discrimination (§4.3) is doomed to failure as there is no natural foundation for segmenting the market, even if this approach did not monopolise value from the datasets, as it clearly does. Price discrimination is incompatible with a policy aim of utility maximisation.

If the government decides not to move to the distribution of OS data freely at marginal distribution cost but opts to distribute it at true marginal cost  (although Placr would not favour this), then the true cost of each dataset should be exposed so that those who need the large scale data such as developers, planners and utilities should pay the costs of the large scale data collection. The marginal costs of deriving small scale data from the large scale data would be relatively low and these would make a lower call on the public purse in this scenario.

Question 4:  What are your views and comments on public sector information regulation and policy, and the concepts of public task and good governance as they apply to Ordnance Survey?

Placr believes that the ‘public task’ of the OS should be aligned to an infrastructure mission based on the free release of data at marginal distribution cost (see response to Question 2). This would avoid the need to wrestle with all the problems of the government acting in the market through the OS’s trading activities (§4.4). If this public task were set over the long term it would avoid commercial jeopardy for companies such as Placr as we would know that the government would not try to compete with us in selling value added products.

Question 5:  What are your views on and comments on the products under consideration for release for free re-use and the rationale for their inclusion?

Placr does not subscribe to the three options that this consultation set out and which define the scope for OS Free. Option 1 of ‘business as usual’ is incompatible with the Smarter Government initiative. Option 2 creates unnecessary complexity with DataCo and ProductCo entities. Option 2 should be a straightforward release of unrefined core datasets with a long term maintenance regime funded by the public purse (with tax benefits from the additional economic activity generating replacement revenue). In our view ProductCo should not exist in a OS institutional model involving the release of unrefined data at marginal distribution cost, as productisation should be carried out by enterprises like Placr.

Question 6:  How much do you think government should commit to funding the free product set? How might this be achieved?

The government should fund the release of unrefined data at marginal distribution cost from a new OS tasked with long term infrastructural development, as informed by legislation and advice from the Location Council and industry.

Question 7:  What are your views on how free data from Ordnance Survey should be delivered?

See answer to Question 5.

Question 8:  What are your views on the impact Ordnance Survey Free will have on the market?

See answer to Question 5.

Question 9:  What are your comments on the proposal for a single National Address Register and suggestions for mechanisms to deliver it?

This proposal is highly desirable. This objective should be part of the long term mission of a new OS that releases unrefined data at marginal distribution cost. A new OS operating on this basis would be able to take leadership of a national address database project working with local authorities, ONS and Royal Mail entirely within the public sector.

Question 10: What are your views on the options outlined in this consultation?

See answer to Question 5.

Question 11:  For local authorities: What will be the balance of impact of these proposals on your costs and revenues?

No response.

Question 12:  Will these proposals have any impact on race, gender or disability equalities?

In Placr’s view, they will not have any impact.